Is The Impact Of Physical Marketing Increasing In 2016?

According to The Post Offices’ sponsored article in Marketing Week, ‘Physical marketing is making a comeback’. Well if anyone’s going to make this claim, it’ll be the Post Office. There are however, interesting points raised which draw not just on their own projections and research, but on healthy returns seen by many companies.

Hotel chain Warner Leisure Hotels reports how important physical marketing for a large proportion of its customer base. Many of its customers are over 55, and although they interact with the brand digitally, the preference for decision making is in the physical.

Their Head of Marketing reports that “Their behaviour is firmly rooted in the physical world with 85% of all holidays booked on the phone or at one of our 13 hotels, and just 15% on the Warner website,”. Performance of physical marketing is impressive, “Digital performance goes from strength to strength with ongoing optimisation, but door drops have seen a year-on-year improvement in performance of 39% and direct mail by 35%

Another finding of the Post Office’ supports this preference, drawn from A study by Canadian neuromarketing firm True Impact., It shows that direct mail is easier to process mentally and tested better for brand recall than other forms of advertising.

Rachel Aldighieri, the Direct Marketing Association’s managing director, says that although digital marketing has increased over recent years, physical marketing has never lost its impact on consumers.

“Its resurgence is also thanks to these digital channels and the data they allow marketers access to,” she says. “Data is increasingly at the heart of the modern marketing industry, giving brands the opportunity to better understand how their campaigns are performing.”

She adds: “Whether it’s physical or digital, the route to success is ultimately having a clear approach to building your campaigns long-term. Brands must benchmark physical and digital campaigns so they can compare, contrast and learn how to improve on these metrics over time.”

So will this lead to more companies using targeted ‘physical’ campaigns as part of their marketing mix in 2016?

If so, as Rachel Aldighieri opines, data will be at the heart of any campaign both in terms of quality and quantity. We can improve the quality of your data and enrich it with insight, so you can complete a multi-channel campaign. Benefit from both the continued preference for physical experiences and the convenience of the digital world.

Read our WhitePaper for an overview of tools to fuel efficient physical marketing.